Why Your Soul Craves Something Bigger Than This World - Psalm 4:4-5 Series

Psalm 4:1-8 For the director of music. With stringed instruments. A psalm of David. Answer me when I call to you, O my righteous God (lit God of my righteousness). Give me relief from my distress; be merciful to me and hear my prayer. 2 How long, O men, will you turn my glory into shame? How long will you love delusions and seek false gods? Selah 3 Know that the LORD has set apart the godly for himself; the LORD will hear when I call to him. 4 In your anger do not sin; when you are on your beds, search your hearts and be silent. Selah 5 Offer right sacrifices and trust in the LORD. 6 Many are asking, "Who can show us any good?" Let the light of your face shine upon us, O LORD. 7 You have filled my heart with greater joy than when their grain and new wine abound. 8 I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.

Introduction

The last two weeks we have been studying Psalm four, where David shows us how to lead an unbeliever to God. The process we see in this psalm has four parts: 1)Go first to God. Make sure you are right with God before you worry about whether someone else is right with God. And doing that will give you both the compassion and the courage you need to share your faith. 2) Show them that the most important question is “What do you love?” You can tell what it is you love the most by what you are most pursuing in life. Make sure they understand that the essence of sin is failure to love God. 3) Talk to the person about how God compares to wind. Show them the emptiness of what they are pursuing. And now this morning we get to the fourth part: Call for repentance.

Five parts of repentance

The call to repentance comes in verses four and five.

4 Tremble and do not sin; when you are on your beds, search your hearts and be silent. Selah 5 Offer right sacrifices and trust in the LORD.

David tells them to do 5 things. 1. Tremble, 2. Turn, 3. Think , 4. Worship, 5. Trust

1. Tremble

The awesomeness of God

The NIV says “be angry and do not sin,” but that is not what the Hebrew says. The Hebrew says, “Tremble and do not sin.”

The attribute of God behind this is His awesomeness. We can tremble in awe before God only because God really is awesome – not in the cheesy, shallow sense that we call almost everything we like awesome in the colloquial slang of our culture where everything that is even slightly good is called awesome, but awesome in the sense of actually being the object of real, knee-buckling, pulse-quickening awe.

God designed the human soul to need to be awed. There is an appetite within us to the sensation of being dwarfed and staggered by something far greater than us. That is why people spend thousands of dollars to visit Niagara Falls or the Alps. It is why movie screens are huge and it is worth it for Hollywood to spend millions on special effects. We have a huge appetite to be awed.

And nothing the world pursues can satisfy that appetite on the long term, because there is more to awe than spectacle. A great action movie is spectacular, but not awesome. It falls short of being awesome because it is meaningless. It is not serious business. It is just fantasyland. Part of the craving of the human soul is a craving for meaning and importance and reality. If you are raising children, one thing you will notice is there comes a time when they are suddenly no longer satisfied with a toy cell phone. They grow out of being satisfied with fantasy and start to desire reality. When our kids are really little they are happy with a toy lawnmower and plastic keys and pretend guns. But that doesn’t satisfy them for long. Pretty soon they start wanting to be a part of the real world. God designed your soul to want to be involved in serious things that really matter - to make decisions that have meaningful consequences - to make contributions that really matter – that make an important difference. And that hunger keeps growing and is never really satisfied until you become involved in eternal things.

So we need to show people that their lives are just a lot of playing around with a set of plastic keys. They might be the CEO of a major corporation or a top scientist, but if they are not involved in the Kingdom of God and are only dealing with temporal things and not eternal things, then they are doing nothing but pushing a fake, plastic lawnmower around the yard.